


unblock this misery

by forsanethaec



Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: Epistolary, Fix-It, M/M, Reconciliation, Singapore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-17
Updated: 2012-01-17
Packaged: 2017-10-29 16:52:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/322048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forsanethaec/pseuds/forsanethaec
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One angry email from Singapore to Palo Alto snowballs into something that Eduardo had almost learned to stop hoping for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	unblock this misery

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Come Talk to Me" by Peter Gabriel or Bon Iver, depending.

Eduardo took a cab from the airport, so when they leave him outside the main doors like a drunk being thrown out of a bar he has nowhere to go. It’s late afternoon, almost dark already. His ears are ringing. He steps off the curb and walks through the parking lot to University Avenue, noticing absently how big it is, how many cars. _Remember the algorithm?_ He trips over nothing, and for a second he stops, doubled over, his hand clenched around the strap of his bag so tight he can feel his nails cutting into his palm.

After that it’s level, trance-like steps, and he walks down the road for a while, maybe longer than strictly necessary, until the Facebook offices are out of sight. There’s light traffic but no cabs in sight. He could call one, probably. But he doesn’t have a number for Palo Alto.

 _Mark probably does_ , he thinks before it occurs to him not to. Then he swallows hard, closes his eyes and shakes his head. Somewhere behind him they’re hitting a million members. He starts walking again and doesn’t stop for half an hour, until there’s a bellhop holding open a door for him and he realizes he’s all the way back at his hotel. The guy asks if he’s okay. Eduardo nods, half-smiling, not making eye contact as he walks past.

In his suite he bolts the door, hangs his jacket up, draws the curtains. He sits down on the edge of his bed and takes his shoes off. Then he puts his head in his hands and sobs, gutting, wracking gasps of sobs that ache deep in his ribcage and leave his head pounding and his whole body shaking, sobs that don’t even sound like crying, that leave his throat raw.

***

He wakes up at 11 the next morning curled awkwardly on top of the sheets, fully clothed with no memory of falling asleep. He feels more hung over than he ever has from drinking. In the shower, turned up as hot as he can stand it, he makes a mental to do list: move up flight back to Boston, hire lawyer, put off phone calls to father.

There are ten unread texts from Dustin when he checks his phone and half as many emails from Chris, all of which he ignores. He gets on his laptop only briefly, just to move his flight.

He wonders peripherally, almost detachedly whether he should delete his Facebook page, but in the end he decides that would be more childish than it would be satisfying.

***

The sad part is, he entertains the fantasy until the moment the plane pulls away from the gate at SFO that it might not be over. That maybe Mark would appear out of nowhere and say – anything, that he’d apologize, that he’d make it better, the way he never once has before. That he’d ask Eduardo to stay, and that Eduardo would be able to find within himself the easy grace to say yes.

Denial is allowed, he thinks. He thinks he’s allowed to want to shield himself from the miles he’s putting between himself and this situation, from the feeling that he’s running, even though there is nothing he should be making up for.

But Mark never shows up. And he’s not waiting at the gate in Boston, and he’s not there in Harvard Yard when Eduardo gets out of his cab. And he still isn’t there when Eduardo talks to Chris and Dustin for the first time and their helpless apologies don’t comfort him at all, when he goes home for Christmas and his father doesn’t speak a word to him the whole time, when he crawls across the finish line to graduation and can barely manage to feel proud of himself.

Soon before the depositions begin, one of Eduardo’s professors calls in a favor with a colleague in some second-tier brokerage’s satellite office in Singapore. She tells Eduardo the last part like it’s the catch and Eduardo almost laughs. He finds out from Gretchen when the depositions are slated to end and tells his new office he can start a week after, finds an apartment that will let him move in then too.

Across the conference table, every tic of Mark’s presence is infuriating, and Eduardo feels like he’s crawling out of his skin. He feels more at all than he has in months, and remembers why it isn’t preferable.

He doesn’t make an effort to say goodbye once it’s over. After all this time, he thinks, it’s his turn to not be there.

He spends the first two hours of the flight to Singapore mentally cataloguing each split second of eye contact – filed under: _Jesus, you’re intolerable_ , filed under: _I forgot what it’s like to try and read you_ , filed under: _I miss you so fucking much_. Then he downs two sleeping pills with an airplane serving of scotch on the rocks and passes out for seventeen hours.

They’re touching down when he wakes up, bleary-eyed. It’s tomorrow.

***

He’s not surprised when he gets the first quarterly report in the mail; he hadn’t left an address with anyone, but then again, invasions of privacy are something of a specialty where Facebook is concerned. The envelope is legal-sized, thick and white, emblazoned with the familiar blue logo and the Palo Alto return address. The fleeting pang it brings on in Eduardo’s chest is decidedly dull, and he’s proud of that, in a relative sort of way. He lights a cigarette – _I need_ some _coping mechanisms_ , he’d told his mother sardonically when it had come up on the phone once, several months ago, his voice newly gravelly and her far-off concern never quite managing to feel kind -- and slides his forefinger under the seal of the envelope.

There are earnings reports, stock figures, new share breakdowns and a letter inviting him to the annual shareholders’ meeting in California, co-signed by the CFO, whose name Eduardo has never bothered to attempt to retain, and by Mark.

Eduardo knows, distantly, through the sudden rushing noise in his ears, that it’s not personal. The signatures are electronic – Mark probably doesn’t even know this meeting is happening. But it’s personal anyway. It’s personal like he’s been slapped in the face.

His laptop is sitting on the kitchen counter. He grabs it, flings himself down on the couch and opens a new email message. Mark’s old Facebook address is still buried somewhere in his contacts.

His hands are shaking so much that it takes him a full minute to type legibly.

 _Mark—_

 _I didn’t leave my address for a reason. Fuck you. Consider this my regrets for all future meetings._

The vitriol is almost surprising. It feels good to be still be angry, in a way that churns hot in the pit of his stomach -- good like the late-night knife-edge between drunk and hung over.

He doesn’t sign it, but reads it over twice before jabbing spasmodically at the send button. The silence in the room is deafening, suddenly. His own breath slows to a defeated panting.

He finishes his cigarette too fast and then smokes two more, until his hands finally stop shaking and he’s just sitting there on the couch, hunched over and hollowed out, staring at the wall.

***

The reply comes two days later.

 _Eduardo,_

 _We both know I had no part in sending those, but thanks for the note. They’re going to hold on to your reports for you in case you ever want them for some reason._

 _Anyway, I thought you might be angrier if I didn’t ask than if I did, so…how are you?_

 _Dustin says hi. He also wants me to tell you that this is weird. I told him that’s one word for it._

 _—Mark_

And it’s funny – hearing Mark’s voice in his head as he reads it actually makes Eduardo more nostalgic than it makes him mad. He stares at the email for what feels like forever, trying to find an object on which to hang his feeling of unfocused, lurking anger, the feeling that’s always ready to rear up at an opportunity like this.

But it’s not like he ever stopped missing Mark. Even when he hated him the most, it’s not like it was ever anything, really, but sad, at its core, even at its very worst. He thinks it dully, feeling his body ache with the knowledge, a mix of guilt and regret. He’s spent a very long time trying to find the perfect low point between hatred and misery. He found it, maybe a year or two before the depositions. Since then, he’s been trying to work his way back up.

He hits reply and writes,

 _I thought I was being rhetorical. Guess not._

 _I’m doing fine. Though I was doing better before I got that shareholders’ report, to be perfectly honest. You had probably that much figured out._

 _But I suppose I’m as good as I could be. I’m working. Singapore is interesting enough._

He stops and stares for a moment at the blinking cursor, inviting and terrifying. There’s a leap to take here and he’s not sure why he wants to take it.

He writes,

 _This definitely is weird. But what about you?_

 _—Eduardo_

 _PS: Tell Dustin I say hi back._

He hits send and closes the machine.

***

And Mark writes back, characteristically curt but not dismissive, and without even understanding why he’s doing it Eduardo does too, and within a few weeks they’re corresponding every day. There’s something disarmingly personal about these short little missives – perhaps the way they have to tailor them to tiptoe around one another, which Eduardo doesn’t mean to do precisely but finds himself unable to prevent – that makes them feel just like dispatches from their estranged lives, something that makes Eduardo want to do it, that makes it feel – good, as though he’s accomplishing something.

Mark’s letters have an air of concession about them, like they’re an olive branch in a fight Eduardo hadn’t really realized was still in progress. Only they’re not talking about anything real; they’re just talking, writing, and Eduardo isn’t really sure what this is yet. He doesn’t want to call it something he never even thought he wanted, something he never thought they’d ever be capable of. It’s just – he wants to talk to Mark. It feels so good to talk to him. Eduardo had no idea it could ever feel so good.

They catch up on each other’s lives as though all that’s happened is they’ve lost touch. The emails get longer, gradually, and Eduardo starts to catch himself smiling as he reads them. Eventually he stops stopping himself.

 _You know, I don’t forgive you,_ he writes one day, apropos of nothing, because it’s starting to get scary how easy this is.

 _I know. I’m not asking you to,_ Mark writes back later that day. _It’s not like I’ve apologized._

Eduardo laughs out loud when he reads it, only half as bitter as he should be.

***  
 _  
Eduardo,_

 _I should preface this by saying I’m not making excuses and I don’t expect this to matter to you, in the grand scheme of things. But I hope you do know that, all other things being equal, I would have wanted you to stay with the company. I wasn’t the one who brought it up first. And it was about you and me least of all._

 _I guess you think you were never really much of a part of it for me ever, I mean, with Facebook. But you’re wrong._

 _It’s been almost five years and we’ve been doing this for a few months now, so I figured I might as well say it._

 _—Mark_

Eduardo can hear Mark’s voice in his head as he reads it over and over, as clear as if they’re in the room together – those familiar clipped syllables, brusque and cagey.

It’s the “five years” aside that keeps hitting him the most, though, in the end. Had Mark done it intentionally? Somehow, all of the confessions seem very nearly obvious, the more Eduardo reads them. A combination, maybe, of the ready-to-make-amends side of Mark that’s clearly been communicating with him for weeks now, and the realization that it _has_ been five years, and that – he never stopped hoping, not really. He was always so ready to believe, spring-loaded, waiting as ever for the slightest opportunity to think Mark cared.

Only, now it doesn’t feel like a deception. Mark has nothing to gain from lying. Now it feels real.

He sits on responding for a long time, though in the relative terms of the way they’ve been operating, that only amounts to a night or so. Sorry, he thinks, is like a landmine between them: Eduardo isn’t expecting Mark to step on it – not yet, at least – but he knows they both know it’s there.

 _I appreciate all of that,_ he writes at long last. _And I know you know this, but it _was_ about us for me, most of all. It always was. _

He thinks that’s probably going to earn him an “And that’s why things had to go down the way they did” or something like that from Mark, but it’s the truth, and this seems like the time.

But – Mark seems to actually want to talk it out. Eduardo can’t help but wonder if he’s doing this of his own volition. Then he remembers “five years,” and his throat tightens a little. Maybe this is just the gamut of the two of them. Maybe this is – what was next.

They talk, over the next few weeks, about the meat of it; about Sean, and the summer, and their fundamental differences, and one day Mark writes, _It killed me to do that to you, Eduardo,_ and Eduardo drops his head into his hands.

He could reply, _then why did you do it?_ But the secret is, he knows now. He’s put enough distance between himself and what happened to finally begin to scrape at the underpinnings of the larger picture. Mark was doing the horrible thing, the emotionless thing, but the thing he thought would protect what he made.

Eduardo wipes his eyes hastily and returns to the email, the words ringing broken in Mark’s voice in his mind. He hits reply. His fingers type, _You should come out to Singapore,_ and his fingers type his address, and his fingers hit send. He’s shaking. He smokes a cigarette, then goes out on his balcony and smokes another. It wasn’t even six months ago that he was giving Mark the finger through the computer over the quarterly report, and this—

It’s as though he has awoken suddenly to find he’s made a series of unchangeable and terrifying and potentially wonderful decisions that his subconscious had long been clamoring for. He doesn’t know what he’s doing – he doesn’t know if this is even what he wants or how it even happened or what it’s going to mean but he does want it, it is what he wants, it is.

The reply comes later that day: a date and a time and a flight number, and the words, _I’ll be there._

Eduardo’s smile breaks trembling across his face like the sun through the clouds. It hurts a little, he’s smiling so hard, but he doesn’t really care.

***

He’s waiting at arrivals when Mark comes out past security, looking distinctly casual about his new surroundings – a bit jet-lagged, at worst. Eduardo supposes he’s doing a lot of traveling these days. His heart is hammering, and he’s a little embarrassed by it, even though there’s no way Mark could know.

He waves, and Mark veers toward him, and – it’s not poetic, it’s not pouring rain, slow motion, Mark outside his window holding a stereo above his head. It’s just Mark, coming to a halt in front of him and dropping his duffel bag on the ground, both of them wearing a slightly sheepish, apprehensive half-grin.

“Hey,” Eduardo says at length. He’d gotten caught up for a second just looking at Mark. It’s been a really long time.

“Hi,” Mark says.

Eduardo looks at him again for a long moment, then says, suppressing a ripple of laughter that might be hysterical, “Is this the stupidest thing we’ve ever done?”

“Could be,” Mark says, the shadow of a smile on his lips. “Do you have a car?”

It’s only early evening, but Mark says he hadn’t managed to get much sleep on the plane; his head keeps dipping against his chest in the car, nodding in and out of half-sleep. Eduardo takes him home and steers him toward the guest room.

“Sleep,” he says. “I’ll be here when you wake up. We can eat something.”

“Sorry,” Mark says on a yawn. Eduardo flinches slightly, just as a reflex. Every part of him feels soft and frightened, a mess of vulnerable nerves and uncertain feelings and Mark here in his house, Mark in Singapore, Mark here, Mark here, Mark finally here with him.

“It’s okay,” he says. He pushes Mark into the dark room with two fingers between his shoulderblades, and closes the door.

The clock radio reads 3:22 a.m. when the sound of the bedroom door opening jolts Eduardo awake. He hadn’t remembered getting in bed or falling asleep. Mark is standing in the doorway in a t-shirt and boxers, silhouetted by the low light from the hallway.

“Mark?” Eduardo mumbles.

“Wardo,” Mark says. He shuffles into the room and crawls over the foot of the bed.

“Are you awake?” Eduardo asks hesitantly.

“Don’t be stupid,” Mark says, and then he’s right there in front of Eduardo, his arms braced on either side of him, and he leans in and presses their mouths together.

Eduardo’s lips fall open in shock first and in response second, and he’s hardly even awake to think anything other than this is so wonderful, the way their mouths fit one another, soft and warm and pliant, and Mark tastes like sleep when Eduardo swipes his tongue across his lower lip and that’s objectively not very pleasant but Eduardo’s not interested in objectivity. He lifts a hand to the back of Mark’s neck, sliding it into his hair, and he’s breaking inside, splitting open, and Mark's flooding in and he’s realizing it so suddenly it’s like a hot shock of fever: this is all he ever wanted.

Mark noses against Eduardo’s cheek when they break apart, eyes still closed, their foreheads tipped together. Eduardo is breathing very shallowly. He is not quite certain whether this is real.

“Sorry,” Mark whispers, warm and close.

“What,” Eduardo says. “Mark—”

“I’ve been thinking about it,” Mark breathes, and then he sits back slightly, settling to one side of Eduardo’s hips. His fingers are searching in the bedclothes, and then they find Eduardo’s hand.

“Mark,” Eduardo murmurs again, the word a sigh of relief and wonder and resignation each time.

“Wardo,” Mark says, smiling slightly. His thumb is swiping back and forth absently over Eduardo’s knuckles. “You’ve started smoking,” he adds blandly.

“Coping mechanism,” Eduardo breathes.

“You should stop,” Mark says. He studies Eduardo’s face for a long moment, everything fuzzy-edged in the dark. “I was just – I’ve missed you, so much, and I – and we’ve been talking, and I wanted to do that, is all.”

“Okay,” Eduardo says. “I. Yes.” He nods, slow at first then faster, and at last a little frantic. “I know. Me too.”

“It’s okay,” Mark says, laughing a little. The sound sparkles between the closeness of the two of them. It feels like surfacing.

“It is,” Eduardo says. He leans forward and kisses Mark again, eyes fluttering shut against his cheek. Mark’s shoulders are trembling slightly, but Eduardo keeps holding onto his hand, and soon enough they stop.


End file.
